Most of the American troops in the Fallujah area are Marines, but these were regular Army soldiers and Military Police officers culled from the Texas National Guard. They and the Iraqi Police officers have forged a straightforward agreement with the civilians in the area: we'll protect you from insurgents if you'll identify them and lead us to their IEDs and weapons caches. Someone from the nearby village of Al Bahuri had just called in a tip to the Iraqis. Their job was to find the cache and destroy it in a controlled detonation. No one had a metal detector, though, and they weren't sure where, exactly, the cache was buried.

But here's an interesting line from the piece

I walked over to Sergeant Guerrero.

"Are you going to ask the locals what they know?" I said.

"Nah," he said. "That's their deal. The Iraqi Police have their sources. We're their liaisons, their trainers. We're not in charge anymore. We're just here to help them become police officers instead of paramilitaries."

This is the kind of stuff you're not going to get in the MSM. It's long, but it's worth reading.